What Meditation
Can Do For You

MEDITATION is something you can do for yourself. Whether it's simply to feel better about yourself or find better ways of dealing with conflicts and differences with others or help heal the aches and pains of life, meditation can show you the way.

It does so by shifting the way you perceive things you might regard as problems and helps you develop an ability to ride through the changes. And it helps harmonise the mind and body in ways which promote healing.

Meditation does not mean blanking the mind or trancing out into some other space or place. It does mean simply being in the present and sensing not thinking. It means also focusing on just one thing - what Buddhists often call 'one-pointed meditation' - so that you fool the mind with something quite simple into thinking it really is quite busy and occupied in a way which allows your mind to calm and your body.

Put very simply meditation settles the mind and relaxes the body. This restores a state of internal balance, or homeostasis, which is the optimum state for self-repair and healing. We can feel this as the difference between pacing ourselves well and stressing out, between leading a busy but satisfying life or lurching from crisis to crisis close to collapse and burn-out.

By relaxing deeply when we can, and by staying relaxed during the day the health benefits can be enormous.

So for a start, meditation can:

  • Relax the body and de-stress the mind quickly when you need to
  • Allow your body to start healing physically whatever ails it
  • Lift your energy levels when you need to after a meditative quick-pause-that-refreshes
  • Improve your ability to both relax and yet focus more intently on whatever you may be doing with fewer distractions to your efforts and thus
  • Improve your workplace performance and productivity
  • Give you techniques with which to get a good night's sleep

In Kevin Hume's workplace or small group or individual meditation courses and on Kevin Hume's three CD set of guided meditations you can identify and learn particular meditations which enable you to target what you want to do and find a meditation that will take you there. (See Courses for You and Your Organisation, and Fantastic CDs For You)

And there are now decades of substantial and reputable scientific research indicating just why meditation can be so good for you in physiological terms. We have learned to measure just what happens to the body when we meditate.